Thinking Back and Looking Forward to Greece

Carol and I are heading to Greece on September 22. We'll be renting a car and driving around the Peloponnese for a couple of weeks, then joining up with a Boat-and-Bike tour out of Corfu.

The last time I was in Greece was in 1971/72, mostly hitchhiking my way with my friend-who-remains-a-friend, Anne, and sometimes hooking up with other “hippie” travellers who swarmed the youth hostels of Europe at the time. The memories seem fresh, but I know they’re not. I always say you can’t go back. But I’m going back. 

Things will have changed. We were in Greece during Papadopolous’ junta, Yugoslavia under Tito, Spain during the the Franco regime. We didn’t think much about that at the time, being 19 and naive, though I remember Yugoslavia having a distinctly Soviet flavour.

First stop will be Athens, and I remember Elias’s place, the Pension Diana, where we stayed (and met Cathy), and the Poste Restante. I remember a little street with stairs where I bought my cheap imitation goatherd bag, or whatever that was, made of red wool. I remember sitting on the Acropolis waiting for a shot of the Parthenon with no people in it — and I got one, which I’m pretty sure can’t be done anymore. That’s about all I remember. In my mind, Poste Restante was on Syntagma Square, but it actually wasn’t, it was near Omonia Square, which I don’t recognize at all when I look at it on Google street view. (This is how deep I look when I’m “researching.”) I remember it being right on the square, that we could look across the square to see it. But that’s not possible, because it was on a side street, according to the records. Memory is a trickster.

Elias and Cathy at the Pension Diana, Athens, January 1972. Cathy was an "older woman" at 22 (or 24?), who rode that bike to Athens from Amsterdam, by herself. Here she's about to ride back.

So, considering it’s been 54 years (jeez), I don’t think I’ll recognize much of anything in Athens. The other places we’ll be that Anne and I visited are Delphi and Corfu. What I remember about Delphi is hitchhiking with Cathy and being picked up by a trucker who then picked up his friend and then stopped in the middle of nowhere so his friend could proclaim his love for each of us in turn. Cathy warded him off with an umbrella. I remember huddling around a little potbelly stove in a kind of general store in Delphi, trying to get warm. I remember looking down a hillside onto the ruins. But I don’t remember a town at all, and it most certainly was there when we were.

All I remember about Corfu is renting scooters and me blasting out “Born to Be Wild” at the top of my lungs as the wind whipped my hair around. Because helmets weren’t invented yet, or something. I don’t remember the town, but I remember breaking down, because scooters always did, and I think someone stopped to help us. I don't have any photos from Corfu, but I have one from Crete:

Exploring Crete via Volkswagen van, January 1972. Left to right: Unknown, Paul, Harold, Fred, Cathy, Anne, Unknown, and myself. I think maybe we met the unknown people in Heraklion and decided to travel in tandem for a bit. 

Returning to Greece now, it will be as if I was never there. Oh, except that I still remember “efharisto" and “parakalo", thank you and you’re welcome. I remember bougatsa, and the little pots of yogurt with the skin on the top, and pastitsio. Papadopolous cookies? Two drachma souvlaki? I’d get mine for one drachma because I didn’t want the meat. Oh…I remember selling blood there. Sheesh. 

Visiting Marrakech recently, the big square is still much the same as it was in 1972, though there are a few dozen semi-permanent juice trucks parked in one corner now. But I went looking for a particular gate we’d use back then, inside which there was a “street” covered in lath that made striped shadows on everything below. No lath now — of course, it would have rotted away in 54 years. The covering now is fancy grillwork. Not the same. And Fez was nothing like I remembered. The shops that used to be cool now sell fridge magnets.

I looked up Elias’s and there’s no record. AI guesses at it, saying there were a lot of unofficial pensions at the time (during the Junta!), especially in the university district, which seems about right from what I remember. I remember walking to it one day and seeing a man in a doorway jerking off. The important stuff, right? I tried to look up the bag I bought, but “traditional” bags don’t look anything like it. Ticky-tacky now is not what ticky-tacky was back then. The jerk-off has got to be long dead.

 

 

A note about the photos: I had a little camera with me and had a budget of one photo per day, because film and developing was expensive. I ended up with ten boxes of slides which I stored with my Mom until she threw them away, bless her heart. Fortunately, Anne had made prints of some of the highlights. These are obviously deteriorating, but Dave (her husband) has kindly scanned them.